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Prostitutes were identified, interviewed, and their health risks assessed in a 1992 study in Lagos, Ado-Ekiti, Benin, Port Harcourt, and Kaduna. A complementary study was conducted in 1993 in Lagos to gain additional information upon the recruitment of prostitutes and the economics of the industry. 50% of the prostitutes sampled were under age 25 years and more than 75% were under age 30. The author notes the lucrative nature of prostitution in her discussion of the supply of prostitutes. All of the women were afraid of sexually transmitted diseases, with 40% reporting having been infected, but very few feared AIDS. The great majority claimed to know no one who had died of AIDS or was infected with HIV. 33% consistently suggest condom use to their clients, while 33% of clients raise the issue to the prostitutes. However, it may be that the majority of sexual intercourse occurs without condom use. This is so partly because managers, pimps, and boyfriends fail to pressure the prostitutes and their clients to use condoms, and the management does not provide them. Thailand is in the midst of a major AIDS epidemic. Commercial sex, an important source of infection in the country, is part of the life of a significant proportion of Thai men and forms a greater proportion of all premarital and extramarital sexual relations than in Nigeria. To check the spread of HIV infection in Thailand, the government has mandated condom use in brothels with the threat of business closure for non-compliance. The responsibility is placed upon the management to provide condoms, to pressure their staff to use them consistently, and to give women unqualified support in rejecting clients who refuse to use them. Transferring the Thai model to Nigeria is considered.

ROME (Reuters) - Italian police working alongside Dutch colleagues arrested 66 Nigerians on Tuesday in connection with a child-smuggling ring suspected of forcing orphans from Nigeria into prostitution and drug-running in Europe.

"We have dismantled a powerful international organisation that was smuggling and exploiting human beings, and especially children," said Italian Interior Minister Giuliano Amato.

Police and prosecutors said the operation, centred on the southern city of Naples, smashed a gang suspected of kidnapping children, especially young girls, from orphanages in Nigeria and smuggling them into Europe to force them into prostitution.

The swoop was linked to two dozen arrests in the Netherlands and across Europe last October, when Dutch prosecutors detailed how the gang took children to the Netherlands, claimed asylum for them, then forced them into prostitution and drug smuggling.

The Italian swoop was coordinated by the anti-Mafia office, whose chief prosecutor Piero Grasso said police had also seized paperwork of the Nigerian gang listing names and phone numbers of 300 drug couriers used to smuggle cocaine in their stomachs.

Fifteen of the arrests were carried out abroad, mostly in the Netherlands, said Italian police, who added that the bust revealed cases of Nigerian women, resident in Italy, adopting Nigerian orphans only to force them into a life of crime.